The Nashville Predators have matched the Philadelphia Flyers offer sheet to RFA Shea Weber that was worth $110 million dollars over 14 years. The defenseman will remain with the club that he has captained for the last 2 seasons.

Nashville won’t be able to trade their star defenseman until the end of the 2012-2013 season. This means that Weber may very well stay in Nashville for the next 14 years and considering the Wings have to face them 6 times per year(If Weber stays healthy) which could end up in 84 regular season meetings between Weber and the Wings. Couldn’t he just have gone east?

Although I am no doubt a biased Wings fan and would have loved to see Weber leave the Western Conference, I do recognize that had Nashville not matched the offer, they would have within a year turned into Columbus 2.0. After already losing Ryan Suter, Alexander Radulov(Again), and probably Andrei Kostitsyn they couldn’t afford to lose another player, let alone a player of Webers skill level.

The Flyers now join the Wings as one of the teams that are in search for a top-4 defenseman and some of the names that will no doubt be thrown around are Coyotes defenseman Keith Yandle and Winnepeg Jets defenseman Tobias Enström who is set to hit the open market at the end of this season.

Weber will be having an annual cap hit of $7,857,143 which gives him the 5th highest cap hit in the league only behind Eric Staal, Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Alex Ovechkin. Also, Ilya Kovalchuck(15 years) and Rick DiPierto(15 years) are the only players in the league to be signed to longer terms than Shea Weber.